An increasing number of portable computer devices are available in the market. These devices include handheld or pocket sized computers, phones and personal digital assistants of various form factors and capabilities. As the computing power and memory capabilities of the handheld devices increase, users are demanding access to more powerful software applications.
Programmers attempting to program complex software applications quickly find that traditional visual software development systems are unsuitable for programming applications to run on the myriad of devices available. Specifically, given the multitude of variations of interfaces, screen sizes, and resolutions among the handheld devices, it can be very difficult for a programmer to ensure that a particular chosen graphical user interface (GUI) of the handheld will appear and work correctly on multiple devices. For example, the display and functionality of the target device is often not well reflected in the capabilities of the development system.
Typically, programmers of handheld devices alternate between first programming on a desktop development system and then running the newly developed software on an emulator of the handheld device, or the actual device, to see if the handheld GUI operates as expected. This can be time consuming and inefficient, especially if a programmer wishes to port the application to a wide variety of portable devices. In one aspect of programming, the typical development environment may allow a handheld device programmer to generate text on a development system with low resolution display. But, when object code for that text is displayed on a high resolution display of a handheld device, the display is at least partially unusable because of the display and programming differences between the development system and the target device.
FIG. 1a depicts a display of a handheld digital device as rendered on a development system. In the FIG. 1 depiction, it is assumed that the development system display device has a lower resolution than the target device. For example, the low resolution development system may have a linear density of 96 DPI which corresponds to a character length of 96 linear pixels per inch, and the target device display matrix is set to 240×320 pixels on the development system. The target of the development system is a handheld digital device, such as a personal digital assistant, a GPS receiver processor, a telephone, a pocket PC or other type of digital devices having a high resolution display. The high resolution display may be a 480×640 pixel matrix with a linear density of 192 DPI which corresponds to a character length of 192 linear pixels per inch.
FIG. 1a includes a display 100 of a handheld digital device screen 110 having a softkey menu bar 150 and a user defined text box 120 at an anchor location of 50×50 pixels 130. The size of the text box 120 is 100×50 pixels. The development system display 100 shows that four characters 140 are displayed in the text box 120. It is assumed that the development system display has a lower resolution than the target digital device. If no accommodation is made for the high resolution display during development of display software for the handheld device, then an error in the final display for the actual handheld digital device can take place.
FIG. 1b displays the prior art error that can result from a failure to accommodate the display differences between a low resolution development system display and a high resolution target device realization. FIG. 1b depicts a resulting display 110′. Here, the size of the text box 120′ is changed from the development system size. The anchor location 130′ at 50×50 pixels is unchanged. But, because the high resolution target device has more available pixels across the width and height of the display screen area, the physical location of the anchor 130′ is closer to the corner of the display screen than in the development system display of 110 FIG. 1a. 
The text displayed 140′ on the high resolution display of the handheld digital device appears cut off and only partially present on the high resolution display. This is due to the reduced size of the text box. Clearly, if the development system did not automatically accommodate for the differences between a development system resolution and a target device resolution, then errors in the display can occur forcing iterations of development to reach a desired display for a target high resolution handheld device.
Thus, there is a need for a “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) development system for a handheld device which properly simulates the text that a high resolution handheld digital device can produce. The present invention addresses the aforementioned needs and solves them with additional advantages as expressed herein.